Any discussion about GNOME vs. KDE is sure to end in tears. It's basically impossible to discuss which of these two Free desktop environments is better than the other, mostly because they cater to different types of people, with different needs and expectatotions. As such, Bruce Byfield decided to look at the two platforms from a different perspective: if we consider their developmental processes, which of the two is most likely to be more successful in the coming years?

Why single out Mono then? Javascript is an ECMA standard. There is nothing preventing ANYONE from claiming a patent in Javascript yet I haven't heard a single person make any noise about that or any other ECMA standarized language.

A description of the difference between Mono and ECMAscript is (essentially) to be found here:

JavaScript was originally developed by Brendan Eich of Netscape under the name Mocha, later LiveScript, and finally renamed to JavaScript. In December 1995, Sun Microsystems and Netscape announced JavaScript in a press release. In March 1996 Netscape Navigator 2.0 was out, featuring support for JavaScript.

Due to the wide-spread success of JavaScript as a client-side scripting language for web pages, Microsoft developed a compatible dialect of the language, naming it JScript to avoid trademark issues. JScript added new date methods to fix the non-Y2K-friendly methods in JavaScript, which were based on java.util.Date. JScript was included in Internet Explorer 3.0, released in August 1996.

Netscape submitted JavaScript to Ecma International for standardization; the work on the specification, ECMA-262, began in November 1996. The first edition of ECMA-262 was adopted by the ECMA General Assembly of June 1997.

ECMAscript is (essentailly) Netscape/Sun IP, adopted also by Microsoft.

.NET is Microsoft IP, some parts of which have been submitted by Microsoft as ECMA standards. It is vitally important to keep in mind the qualifier "parts of which".

Since Netscape donated their code to open source, I would imagine that there is some kind of accompanying pledge which prevents other parties from claiming after-the-fact patents in Javascript and other related technologies.